The weekly register. [volume] (Point Pleasant, Va. [W. Va.]) 1862-1909, 1887-03-09
TIE MOOD OF TIE czAa.


The Ro11qasion OF AD9oiuto Power LennD
to y Special Mental Disease.
De Quincy, In his wonderful study Of
the early Cesars. the paper in which his
power of suggestive narrative and his con-
troll over the resources of language arc
perhaps seen at their best, IS, SO tospealr,
driven by wonder at the wild willfuIness
of his subjects to suggest that all the
CHsars of the Julian house were mad.
Caligula may have been, though his
symptoms, as recorded by Suetonius, are
rather those of delirium tremens; but the
theory which makes of the grand though
sinister statesman, Tiberius, who gave the
Roman monarchy its final impress, man
of disordered mind In the ordinary medi-
cal sense, will not readily be accepted as
correct. he was no more mad than
Philip III, whose private life was much of
the same kind.
It would, as we read history, be far
trucr to say that power, when really alb
solute, so absolute that the volition is
executive and the necessity for self
restraint is unfelt, produces of itself a
special mental disease, which is not in
sanity, because it would disappear with
the power, but has at intervals, like the
passion of children, many of its external
symptoms and effects. Nero, the artist
emperor, who was always seeking the
impossible, and whom tho early Chris
tians believed to be the veritablc incarna-
ton of evil, may be said undoubtedly to
have suffered from it; SO did one or two
of the italian tyrants of the Renaissance:
and so, in our Judgment, though it is
disputable point, did Ivan the Terrible.
Power of that sort, though it does not al
ways injurc the mind-for several of tho
Caesars and some of the emperors of
Delhi were men of splendid sanity and
judgment-when it happens to fall to a
man prcdisposed by inherited tendency
or by drink, ur by special solitariness of
nature, undoubtedly weakens the re-
strainilIg force of the will and strength.
ems impulse until many Of his acte
resemble closely the acts of madmen.
Half the great sovereigns of Asia, if tlleiI
private lives were accurately known.
would be seen to have had their charac-
tiers, SO to speak, poisoned by power, as
directly as If they had been poisoned with
one of the drugs which temporarily dis
tlrb reason.
Drink, wild and continuous drunken
ness with bad brandy, was the predis-
posing cause in Peter the Great. and, it
is believed, in Theebaw, and probably In
the Emperor Baber, who, wise by day
light. would in the moonlight occupy
himself in jumping from battlement to
battlement of his palace, eighty feet from
the ground. In Car Paul the predis-
posing cause was probably an insane ten
dency, though that is not quite proved;
and in Alexander III it is solitariness
almost beyond example. There is not
man in the world more deeply to be
pitied than the present emperor of Russia.
The loneliness of kings, a LONELINESS natu-
rally resulting from their place, which
hardly admits of friendship and does not
admit of equality, is always terrible, and
is frequently felt by themselves SO severely
that they break through all restraints of
prudence and moral law in order to be
rid of 1.-THE Spectator.